Are you capable of taking a perfectly good 158-year-old company and turning it into dust? If so, then you may not be earning up to your full potential.

You should be raking it in like Richard Fuld, the longtime chief of Lehman Brothers. He took home nearly half-a-billion dollars in total compensation between 1993 and 2007.

Last year, Mr. Fuld earned about $45 million, according to the calculations of Equilar, an executive pay research company. That amounts to roughly $17,000 an hour to obliterate a firm. If you’re willing to drive a company into the ground for less, apply by calling Lehman Brothers at (212) 526-7000.

Oh, nevermind.

I’m delighted to announce that Mr. Fuld (who continues to lead Lehman since it entered bankruptcy proceedings this week) is the winner of my annual Michael Eisner Award for corporate rapacity and poor corporate governance. The award honors the pioneering achievements in this field of Mr. Eisner, the former Walt Disney chief.

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So many foreclosed homes are for sale in Southern California that these distressed properties will soon dominate the market, forcing prices down even further.

About half the homes sold in the region in August had been repossessed, according to figures released Wednesday by the real estate tracking service MDA DataQuick, driving prices down 34% over the previous year to a median of $330,000….

“We’ll certainly see more than 50% foreclosures,” said Sean O’Toole, chief executive of ForeclosureRadar, a seller of default data.

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John McCain and Barack Obama disagree on a lot. Lately, they’ve been especially disagreeable in their disagreements over who deserves the most blame for the presidential campaign’s ongoing descent into the trivial and the downright misleading. But they rightly concur that American institutions of higher learning should allow Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs on campus.

Both White House candidates stated the position last Thursday night during a forum on public service at Columbia University in New York City, a few hours after they made a joint appearance in a 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero.

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From every side we suddenly hear people calling for more regulation of financial markets. The calamity on Wall Street has brought to public attention the frightening risk-taking of firms like Lehman Brothers, which lent money against assets at a rate of 35 to 1.

Something must be done! The government must put a stop to this!

But in the excitement of scapegoat-hunting, something important is forgotten: Wall Street was doing exactly what the government wanted it to do. Almost all the exotic credit instruments now wreaking havoc trace back to the simplest of all assets: the single-family home.

Insurance giant AIG, for example, held almost $100 billion in mortgage-backed securities when the market began to fall last year — and almost one-third of those securities were based on subprime loans.

The United States takes pride in high home ownership rates. Over the past decades, administrations of both parties encouraged ever looser lending standards in order to push the home ownership rate higher and higher still.

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As we learn this morning via Julie Satow of the NY Sun, special exemptions from the SEC are in large part responsible for the huge build up in financial sector leverage over the past 4 years — as well as the massive current unwind

Satow interviews the above quoted former SEC director, and he spits out the blunt truth: The current excess leverage now unwinding was the result of a purposeful SEC exemption given to five firms.

You read that right — the events of the past year are not a mere accident, but are the results of a conscious and willful SEC decision to allow these firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that, in the past 30 years, had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1.

Instead, the 2004 exemption — given only to 5 firms — allowed them to lever up 30 and even 40 to 1.

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Alan Greenspan, of course, saying in that way he has that he’s going to keep interest rates low as long as it takes. When he gave that congressional testimony five years ago, he was about to lower the Fed short-term interest rate to 1 percent and leave it there for more than a year. That, in and of itself, wasn’t a bad thing. It’s what people did with all that cheap money that’s gotten us into trouble.

They borrowed. They borrowed a lot. And then they got creative, using things like collateralized debt obligations to bundle risky mortgages into something they could sell off in the markets. But when the value of the houses behind those mortgages began dropping? Well, here’s financial analyst Peter Cohan.

PETER COHAN: Nobody knows what’s in these bundles of mortgages. And they have a very, very low value because nobody can open them up and figure out which ones are paying and which ones are not paying. It’s like Superman trying to look inside of a box that’s wrapped in lead. You just can’t see inside.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past year-and-a-half, when the markets don’t know what’s inside. they just stop. They stop lending. They stop buying. Nobody trusts anybody. And, presto, a credit crisis.

There’s an argument to be made — and lots of really smart people have made it — that all those financial innovations, things like CDOs, were inevitable. That once you had basically free money, thanks to Alan Greenspan, and a crowd on Wall Street that’s always looking for an edge, abuses were bound to happen. That what we’ve got here is a failure of regulation.

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Is the United States no longer the global beacon of unfettered, free-market capitalism?

In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to American International Group, the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, but it has also probably undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad.

“I fear the government has passed the point of no return,” said Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. “We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams.”

The bailout package for A.I.G., on top of earlier government support for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has stunned even European policy makers accustomed to government intervention ”” even as they acknowledge the shock of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

“For opponents of free markets in Europe and elsewhere, this is a wonderful opportunity to invoke the American example,” said Mario Monti, the former antitrust chief at the European Commission. “They will say that even the standard-bearer of the market economy, the United States, negates its fundamental principles in its behavior.”

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The wonder of financial crises is how events can move straight from impossible to inevitable, without ever passing through improbable.

Two weeks ago nobody would have imagined that, before the end of the month, the Bush Administration would have nationalised the world’s biggest insurance company, that two of the four biggest global investment banks would be out of business and that the US Government would take responsibility for three quarters of the country’s new mortgage loans.

Sadly, the events of the past two weeks may be only the prelude, not the climax, of this amazing crisis. Even the apparent rescue of Halifax Bank of Scotland may result in a bigger crisis, if the drowning HBOS drags down its rescuer, Lloyds TSB. If this happens, every big bank in Britain, except possibly HSBC, will have to be nationalised, Northern Rock-style.

The same would become inevitable in the US if market speculators who have been richly rewarded by the US Government for taking down Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers and AIG, turn their attention to the next group of stumbling financial institutions in the firing line: Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citibank. If any of these wounded giants collapses, the others will fall like dominoes and the entire US financial system will have to be nationalised. In a financial crisis, the impossible can become inevitable in one day, as we saw in Britain on Black Wednesday.

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Adoption of the proposed Anglican Covenant could be completed much sooner than the 10-year time frame mentioned frequently during the Lambeth Conference, according to one of the two Covenant Design Group members from The Episcopal Church.

Basing on submissions received from bishops attending the Lambeth Conference, the Rev. Ephraim Radner predicted that only a small minority of provinces would fail to approve the Covenant. Prof. Radner, who teaches historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto, said the Covenant Design Group is scheduled to disband after holding a second meeting sometime after the first of the year. From there, the Covenant is scheduled to be considered by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), which meets next May in Jamaica.

Prof. Radner told The Living Church it is not clear whether the ACC would be asked to hold an up-or-down vote on the final language drafted by the Covenant Design Group or whether they would be encouraged to propose amendments before a vote.

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Jefferts Schori described the Georgia Diocese as “healthy” and one that “represents the broad range of the church across the nation.”

“There’s room for everyone who wants to be a part of this body, and I think this diocese is a good example. There is room for people who want to use the 1928 prayer book, and there is room for Integrity,” she said, referring to a national Episcopal group that supports the blessing of same-sex couples and the ordination of people who are openly gay.

“The difficulty can be when one member of the body says another can’t be a member.”

Jefferts Schori briefly addressed the church’s pending lawsuit against Christ Church Savannah, a 275-year-old congregation known as “the mother church of Georgia” that voted in 2007 to leave the Episcopal Church but keep its historic downtown property.

“I’ve heard you say you need to protect the property of the Episcopal Church, that it’s your fiduciary responsibility,” said Robert Lundy, spokesman for the theologically conservative American Anglican Council based in Atlanta. “At what point is it just not worth it to sue people who believe they are Christians just like you do?”

“We’re not suing people because they believe they’re Christians,” Jefferts Schori said. “I lament that, and I would bless that journey. But it’s not my right to send with them the family heritage.”

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Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

“One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”

From 1990 through 2002, for instance, the Canadian Supreme Court cited decisions of the United States Supreme Court about a dozen times a year, an analysis by The New York Times found. In the six years since, the annual citation rate has fallen by half, to about six.

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The huge rally came after the government moved overnight to rescue troubled insurer American International Group Inc. with an $85 million bailout loan. The Federal Reserve stepped in after AIG, teetering on collapse from losses tied to the subprime crisis and the credit crisis, failed to find adequate capital in the private sector.

The emergency measure came a day after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., a 158-year-old investment bank, filed for bankruptcy after failing to find a buyer.

Fearing more tightening of credit markets, investors reacted swiftly and began dumping stocks and socking money into gold, silver and other safe-haven commodities. Gold is especially attractive during times of crisis because the metal is known for holding its value.

Jon Nadler, analyst with Kitco Bullion Dealers Montreal, said buying accelerated as rumors spread across trading floors that another financial firm may be in trouble.

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The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., whose insurance fund has slipped below the minimum target level set by Congress, could be forced to tap tax dollars through a Treasury Department loan if Washington Mutual Inc., the nation’s largest thrift, or another struggling rival fails, economists and industry analysts said Tuesday.

Treasury has already come to the rescue of several corporate victims of the housing and credit crunches. The government took over mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and helped finance the sale of investment bank Bear Stearns to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Eleven federally insured banks and thrifts have failed this year, including Pasadena, Calif.-based IndyMac Bank, by far the largest shut down by regulators.

Additional failures of large banks or savings and loans companies seem likely, and that could overwhelm the FDIC’s insurance fund, said Brian Bethune, U.S. economist at consulting firm Global Insight.

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